Jesus Christ, who needs that many templates? Aren't there enough by now?

Well, this template has one fragile aspect setting it apart. Currently (2019), it is one of the most modern approaches. Most of its core aspects are actively maintained and/or are relatively new in themselves. At the time of writing, the core packages (unicode-math, glossaries-extra, polyglossia, luatex itself, ...) saw updates within the last few weeks.

TeX is moving slowly, and as such, best practices, packages and methods from over 10 years ago are still actively used today. Templates are handed down the generations, catching serious dust in parts that haven't been touched in ages. Sometimes, packages will be from the previous century. They all work well, but not great. This template is an attempt to only employ the latest and greatest of what the LaTeX world has to offer (and some of that is still old). Outdated, no longer maintained packages are avoided if possible.

At the core of it all is the thesis template class file (*.cls) (as well as the presentation preamble).

The compiled output (presentation) is also part of the repository.

This template is also a toolbox: many templates don't go into much depth about actually 'doing' LaTeX, e.g. Tikz/InkScape, Math, Lists, Beamer...

This document does that, and as such can also serve as a quick reference tool to copy-paste code skeletons for annoying tasks with syntactical complexity (subfigures, tables, ...).

As such, this template is more about features, and less about design. Design is a slippery slope, and for every one beautiful way, there are ninety-nine lackluster ones. Of those ninety-nine, the majority will be plain eyesores. It is better left to pros, which is why this template does not do much in the way of design.

Contributions to add more features/examples or nice design tweaks are very welcome.

An effort is made to provide support for multiple languages. We can simply pass desired languages as (global) options to the documentclass. They will be picked up by all relevant packages, mainly of course polyglossia. Other packages that then employ the correct language settings are:

• KOMAScript itself (Chapter, Kapitel, ...)
• cleveref (Equation 1.1, Gleichung 1.1, ...)
• datetime2 (June 6, 2019, 6. Juni 2019, ...)
• caption (Table, Tabelle, ...)
• csquotes ('Quote', ,,Zitat'', ...)
• biblatex
• perhaps more...

Currently, supported languages are:

• english, german

With english in bold as the language in mind when this template was first created. It will remain the main language.

All other languages require new translations to be added. You can add your own translations in the respective file.

There is currently no hope of also having 'variants' of languages (like british for english). polyglossia does not provide an interface for that, only for the main language (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/413592/120853).

We now ...

• use beautiful, capabale fonts based on TeX Gyre for high-quality typesetting.

  For that, we do not rely on a package implementation: we bring our own fonts. That way, if you have favourites of yours, you can quickly adapt this template. It can also take system-installed fonts, e.g. the beautiful Consolas that ships with Windows (but is not free).

• employ KOMA-script to handle our documentclass.

  That is nothing new at all, but still dangerously underrated in my opinion. It offers a great set of sensible default values, so we essentially won't have to do anything and still get correct margins etc.

  Some of its built-in packages are especially noteworthy:

  • tocbasic for a gateway into managing content lists (Table of Contents etc.)
  • scrlayer-scrpage, offering page styles. These are used to set headers and footers. We do not use fancyhdr.

• compile using lualatex for full Unicode support. No fiddling with inputenc or fontenc packages anymore --- let's move on.

  lualatex is the designated successor to pdflatex. It supports the contour package and allocates memory as needed (so tikz-externalize and its caveats are avoided).

  AFAIK, xelatex is not as versatile, yet is much more prevalent (double the number of hits on Google). All issues I ever had with xelatex (see above) were banished switching to lualatex.

• use glossaries-extra, the latest, most capable glossary/nomenclature/indexing package. It is used with bib2gls as its backend (a Java tool) to draw entries from respective *.bib-files. This is also used for symbols, allowing for a highly cross-referenced document with absolutely consistent symbol typesetting and global management of them.

  You can have your abbreviations/symbols/sub-superscripts in *.bib files now, with the familiar syntax (reminiscent of JSON) for the entries. Their order does not matter, they will be sorted by the bib2gls tool. The sorting can be customized to a dizzying degree --- or left out entirely, if you don't want it sorted.

  The resulting glossary/nomenclature can also be printed in a fully customized way.

  nomencl with its hacks is no longer needed.

• a custom title-page.

  It is nothing fancy, but I had a very good run with it over the years. It is right there in plain sight for you, easily modified.

• biblatex with biber, the currently most powerful bibliography tool. Its manual is over 300 pages long and will exhaust your every desire.

• custom environments for code, chemical reactions and illustrations.

• multiple sub-indices using splitindex (however, this should better be done using glossaries-extra in the future).

• have a lot of control over figure and caption configurations combining floatrow and caption. floatrow is actually a bit old and awkward to use. We could probably use something more modern here.

• are free to use A5 paper. I am a huge fan! Many people ask why the default margins are so damn large (also, in that question, they mention the package geometry; we have KOMA-script for that). The margins aren't too large: the (default A4) paper is. Only avid readers can process lines in excess of approx. 80 characters. All others suffer headaches and find texts like that hard to read. KOMA knows about that and the many other 'rules' aka conventions, producing the margins you see.

  There is very good reason books don't usually come in A4 or letter format. It is often much closer to A5, which suddenly makes sense: margins are small, the text fits nicely. It is nice to read and hold. If your document is an actual thesis of many dozens of pages, maybe look into using A5.

  To see it in effect, uncomment the a5 option (we decrease the font size by 1pt, down from the default of 11pt) in the base file when calling the documentclass. At this point, there is a reward for careful typesetting: specifying lengths etc. in absolute units will likely break the document. Having done all that jazz in relation to linewidth, textwidth and their siblings will scale everything accordingly. Nevertheless, not all things will come out right. These will require manual attention.

  It is probably telling that a document of X pages in a4paper and 11pt (the KOMA default) will come out to very close to X pages again in a5paper and 10pt: we mainly cut out on wasted white-space and made better use of available space, without suddely requiring 2X pages (since we halved the page size).

The presentation template is largely a fork of the popular mtheme/metropolis. The changes made to it are mostly additions, not ommisions or replacements, since that template is already very good.

As you can see, the presentation shares content with the thesis. It uses the same ...

• image directory,
• *.bib files for glossaries-extra: all the exact same abbreviations, symbols etc.,
• CSV files for plotting,
• bibliography file,
• abstract.

The presentation uses different fonts. They are currently not used (with unicode-math), for reasons mentioned in the presentation preamble. The metropolis theme brings its own Fira fonts (but not math font), so that it still works. Once the wonderful Fira Math font works better, we should probably switch to full unicode-math and Fira Math functionality. It will look stunning!

If you don't have a distribution already, I recommend TeX Live as a full installation. It comes with everything this template needs (save for Java for bib2gls).

All this is quickly built using latexmk with a custom latexmkrc file. It contains some Perl commands to make it work with bib2gls and splitidx and their generated auxiliary files. latexmk is maintained by John Collins, who contributed the splitidx routine. The entire thing should be OS agnostic.

A single call

latexmk filename

on our core TeX files will process the entire chain, containing

• lualatex,
• bib2gls,
• splitindex,
• biber.

Calling

latexmk

without any arguments will process all *.tex files found in the directory.

On Windows, such calls can be made by right-clicking into the Explorer Window (but not on a file or directory) while holding down Shift , then Open PowerShell window here. Linux users will know what they are doing, I won't be able to help.

The produced PDF will be processed fully, with all contained cross-references, citations etc. in place. Once you get used to what all the individual steps do, you won't need latexmk each time. For quick building and debugging, when you don't care for anything else, running lualatex once will likely suffice.

The entire thing can also be used in Continuous Integration. A script for GitLab, alongside a Docker image, is found in the config file. I do not yet have an equivalent GitHub/Travis config.

During the build process, you can use the metadata text file to sed the relevant entries. These are grabbed by TeX to print the metadata directly into the generated PDF. Suggestions on improving that pipeline are welcome!

• glossaries-extra:

  Using \glssetcategoryattribute{<category>}{indexonlyfirst}{true}. For all items in <category>, it is meant to only add the very first reference to the printed glossary. If this reference is within a float, this breaks, and nothing shows up in the '##2' column.

  The way the document was set up, most symbols are currently affected. However, in an actual document, it is highly unlikely you will be referencing/using (with \gls{<symbol>}) symbols the first time in floating objects. Therefore, this problem is likely not a realistic issue.

• glossaries-extra:

  When using package subimport. That package introduces a neat structure to have subdirectories and do nested imports of *.tex files. But that might not be worth it, since it breaks many referencing functionalities in TeXStudio.

  More importantly, it seems to cause glossaries-extra to no longer recognize which references have occurred. We currently call selection = all in \GlsXtrLoadResources to load all stuff found in the respective *.bib file, regardless of whether it has actually been called at some point (using \gls{} etc.). This is a bit like if biblatex did not recognize cite commands and we just pulled every single item in the bibliography file. Some people use gigantic *.bib files, shared among their projects. If suddenly every entry showed up in the printed document despite not being referenced (be it a glossary or a bibliography item), chaos would ensue.